Tag Archives: Tizen Samsung Phone

Tizen just hit the 1.0 release last week (codenamed Larkspur), and at the Tizen Conference I’ve had the chance to play with the prototype device that Samsung has been handing out to developers to test their applications. Its basically a super large screen device, (4.65 inch my guess is about 4.3-4.7″ inches, 1280 x 720p HD Super AMOLED) that’s running on an 1.2 Ghz dual core A9 chip, with 1 GB of RAM. There’s also an 8 MP camera. In some cases it contains a cellular radio, while some device are WIFI only. There’s no word on what clock speed are they running at, or the the size of battery that’s inside.

While it is a reference design, it still gives us an idea of what the Tizen UI will look like and the core functionality that will come with it. We’ve already known that Tizen has an excellent HTML5 browser that bests everything currently on the market. After playing with the phone, we now know that it is heavily inspired from what Samsung’s been doing with TouchWiz. There’s a pulldown notification area just like Android, there are WIFI, Bluetooth toggles etc just like on Touch Wiz, multiple homescreens and so on. More importantly, there’s support for tethering out of the box, there’s also support for Google, Facebook and Twitter accounts out of the box so that you can sync your contacts nicely. There even seem to be push notifications for activity on Facebook etc, although I haven’t seen it in action. Next, there’s support for services like Picassa, YouTube to aid in uploading content.

I spent some time with the device and captured my initial impressions as I went though the process of exploring the new OS. The following 7 minute video should give you a fair idea of what to expect on Tizen.

Again, this was a reference device and the load times, speed of operation etc does in no way represent what a real-world Tizen phone would be capable of.

If you are looking for pictures of the prototype device our friends at Tizen Talk have a few. What do you think of Tizen?